22 Sep A Spouses Take
Dear Reader:
Let me preface this letter from my husband a bit. My husband and I have been married for ten years and have 7 wonderful children (yeah you could argue that and we do with each other often lol). My husband did two tours in Iraq and has always been super supportive of me and my choices. When I started this site I asked him to write an article for all those spouses out there. I did not know what he would write, I didn’t ask what he was writing while he wrote it. After reading it….. I still love him. I will think about how I treat him more often and I will try not to get in my own head so much. Also, I still contend the flies in our home are an issue : )
So, your spouse has decided to go to an online law school. This will likely change your shared world quite a bit. Most likely, these changes will be rough. Some will be hard to handle. Some will make you wonder why you are doing any of this, particularly if you were not consulted much about the whole law school issue in the first place. If you were consulted, that probably won’t make you feel better at some point, when things get rough. Do not lose heart. Things get better. You will get your spouse back. You may even be able to connect in a couple new ways after all this is over
First and probably the most obvious issue you will deal with: you will become unimportant sometimes. This is to say, you will feel unimportant. Your spouse went into law school feeling like they could do this, like they would ace this mess like they did their bachelor’s and master’s degree. This feeling will be fleeting. These thoughts are all a trap, from which there is only one of two ways out: failure or victory. After a very short while in law school, your spouse will feel panicked and downtrodden by the horrifying mysteries of law. Terrible secrets which no mortal being was meant to know. To cope with this, they will study. They will spend every spare second mulling over legal details in their heads, or bent over some legal tome like a decrepit old wizard. They will spend less time with you. They will spend less time with your kids. It WILL feel like you are being ignored. You are. You are being ignored because your spouse is trapped in a logical rubix cube, from which there is no escape but passing grades or humiliating defeat. Be a god damn adult and deal with this like a grown up. Leaving your spouse alone to study when they need to study is one of the best ways to support them and to make sure everyone gets out of this alive.
And it is about everyone, make no mistake. You cannot say that this has nothing to do with you. Your whole family is riding this train now. Your wife or husband has chosen a career path that will be best for all of you. The universe will not apologize for it being a rough path. Anything worth doing is worth bleeding a bit for. If you want to be a good spouse, you will help get to the end of the tunnel.
If you come home from work or what have you, and dinner isn’t made; go make dinner. If he/she hasn’t said anything to you in ten hours (a very real possibility), ask how the reading is going, and be about your business. When there is time for you, you will get time. After four years in law school, the two of you will have plenty of time together, so deal with this part like a man and look to the future.
Second, you will notice a slight personality change. Your spouse is not turning into a different person, they are learning new things and new levels of stress. Most likely, after 2L, they will not feel a need to sugar coat their responses to other people. If you are a veteran, a policeman, or any of these myriad profession’s, then you likely already understand this mentality. For others, the simple explanation is this: Once a person realizes how important their knowledge is or how much it affects others, the capacity they have for other folk’s shit drops dramatically. One no longer feels like kowtowing to anyone. If your spouse starts letting his/her in-laws know how they feel, or snaps at a school attendance officer who wants your kids to show up regardless of illness, they are not being an ass. It is also noteworthy that, once the law school ride is over neither of you have to put up with other people’s shit anymore. You can both enjoy being increasingly eccentric, together, long into old age.
Third, your spouse will ask you a lot of questions that you have no answer to. They will accuse you of “not getting it.” Arguments will become impossible, mostly because lawyers argue as a profession. There is a simple cure for this: Your spouse has law books, do some reading. You will most likely not achieve the legal knowledge your significant other is accumulating, but knowing anything is better than nothing. It also might show them you care, and you definitely should care. Law school is not easy, and it takes a terrible emotional toll. If you do not show some support, there will only be negative consequences.
Your spouse will also start to do weird and nonsensical things. My wife is obsessed with laundry, bed making, and flies. You have to remember that the human mind can only deal with so much. Law school is a lot to deal with. The stress will manifest in a lot of strange ways. This is okay. It does not mean you have to start folding hospital corners or going on genocidal crusades against house flies. It only means that you will have to do these things sometimes, to show your support. Talk about things that bother your spouse (not when they are trying to study). The support you give may be the only support your partner has, and if you are unwilling to be supportive, that makes you a Blue Falcon. Blue Falcon is a term we had in the Army, it means “buddy Fucker.” A real shit-bag.
You will also have to deal with your spouse’s new circle of peers. From what I gather, lawyers do not have friends that are also not lawyers. This has a lot to do with being asked repeatedly “can you do the paperwork for my divorce” over and over and over again. All the law school students you meet will be in the same crazy boat as your spouse. You may sometimes feel like all these law school folks look down on us poor non-legals. That’s okay, we can take them in fisticuffs, because they are nerds. Your spouse is your spouse, his/her new law friends are just law friends. Do not feel threatened. Your spouse does not think he/she is magically smarter than you, that’s just all the law nonsense coming across. Keep being supportive, eventually you will all be able to talk like people again.
The cost. Oh, the cost. Be prepared for some level of financial difficulty. Being law school poor is like being regular-poor. Eat soup, smoke your Pyramid brand cigarettes, and move on. In four years, you won’t have to eat soup and significant other can sue the soup company for all your new health issues.
The end all and be all of this whole article is this: It will be rough at times. The love of your life will seem stark raving mad occasionally. You will feel like you are losing something. Let all that roll off your back. Don’t try and keep score. Never tell your spouse that what they are doing isn’t important, because that would be a foolish lie. Be supportive. Be what they need you to be right now. Do some learning of your own. Every year in law school that goes by gets a little better for both of you. In ten years, you will both look back on this, and probably won’t even remember any of the bad parts. Be good and be an adult. Make dinner, kill flies, fix the sink, and talk about non-school related BS every now and then so you both don’t crack up. This will all be better someday, and you will both sit on the couch mocking the terrible inaccuracies of CSI Miami (or whatever legal drama is popular at the time).